Hypotheses Development

Abstract

In this chapter, a number of hypotheses regarding the impact of proactive customer orientation, its antecedents, and contingency factors are developed. Overall, findings from literature and my qualitative inquiries indicate that proactive customer orientation positively affects customer value and business performance. However, it still lacks insights of whether proactive customer-oriented climate and proactive customeroriented processes affect exploratory as well as exploitative innovation, and about contingency factors that moderate these relationships (see Chapter 2.3.2 for details). Further, little is known about the antecedents for proactive customer orientation. Thus, based on the conceptualization of proactive customer-oriented climate and proactive customer-oriented processes from the previous chapter, these relationships are examined. To overcome limitations of existing research (Connor 2007; Ketchen et al. 2007), I develop my hypotheses along the entire underlying framework of the resource-based view. The performance implications of proactive customer orientation in existing studies are displayed in Figure 4–1 and include exploratory innovation, customer value, and new product performance, all investigated separately. The framework of the hypothesized main effects is provided in Figure 4–2 and includes the strategic resource, the strategic action, the competitive advantage, and the resulting performance implication. Thus this study investigates proactive customer orientation and its consequences are much more detailed than previous research.